3. The social reformer who sets his heart on external changes is apt to become _impatient_ to bring about those changes. For since he attempts to work from without inwardly, and not at the same time from within outwardly, he has nothing to show for his pains unless the desired outward changes are actually effected. In this way may be explained a certain dictatorial manner, a certain arbitrariness sometimes observed in social workers of whose earnestness and devotion there can be no question, the preposterous outcome being that in attempting to carry out plans of reform in a democratic community such reformers offend against the very principle of democracy by over-riding the personality of others. 4. The Social reformer who concentrates his attention on external changes is apt to be ambitious of large results, to measure betterment by statistical standards. Though quality be not overlooked, _quantity_ is likely to be over-emphasized. 5. The painful spectacle is sometimes presented of a leader in social movements who _goes to pieces morally in his private relations_ (becomes a bad father, a worthless husband, an unscrupulous sponge on his friends, etc.). Absorption in extensive public movements has this danger in it that it often tends to make men neglectful of the nearer duties. Facts of this kind, which came repeatedly under my observation in the course of years, drove home to my mind the conviction that the provisional method in social reform (the method of working for external changes without definition of the end) is morally perilous, both in its effects on those who are to be benefited, and in its reaction on the character of the reformer himself. I parted company with opportunism in every one of its forms; I became more and more imbued with the belief that no one can really help others who in the effort to do so is not himself morally helped, i.e., whose character is not improved in every respect, who does not become a _better_ father, husband, citizen, a more upright man in all his relations in and because of his endeavors to benefit society. I became convinced that the ethical principle must run like a golden thread through the whole of a man’s life, in a word, that social reform unless inspired by the spiritual view of it, that is, unless it is made tributary to the spiritual, the total end of life, is not social reform in any true sense at all.[15]